Director, Engineering Excellence & Design Standards

About the role

Shield AI is a venture-backed defense-tech company developing intelligent systems to protect service members and civilians, including aircraft such as X-BAT and V-BAT. It is looking for a senior technical leader to define and operationalize engineering design standards across the company, establishing engineering excellence through consistency, rigor and scalability across design, analysis, certification, CAD, documentation and configuration management. This is a high-impact individual contributor role with broad scope across engineering disciplines.

Key responsibilities

• Establish and own engineering design standards across programs, including X-BAT and V-BAT
• Define and standardize best practices for aerospace design, analysis workflows and system-level engineering rigor
• Develop standards for CAD usage, drawing quality, standard notes, release processes and engineering documentation
• Handle manufacturing and supply chain handoff, including EBOM and MBOM creation and part demand
• Build and mature an engineering excellence framework that scales with the company
• Partner with engineering leadership to align teams on consistent ways of working
• Influence design decisions and engineering processes across disciplines without becoming a bottleneck
• Improve configuration management, documentation quality and design consistency

Required profile

• 10+ years of experience in aerospace or high-performance hardware design environments
• Broad technical background across mechanical, aerospace, systems and other engineering domains
• Experience defining or applying design standards, documentation practices and configuration management systems
• Ability to influence senior engineers and drive alignment across teams
• Track record of improving engineering quality, consistency and scalability
• Ability to obtain a S//SAR level security clearance is desired

Required skills

• Familiarity with MIL-STD-810, DO-160 and ASME Y14.5 (GD&T)
• Excellent communication skills with technical audiences